Make Yourself an Expert

The most valuable people in any organization have deep smarts — business-critical expertise built up through years of experience which helps them make wise, swift decisions. If you wish to become this go-to person in your company, but don’t have the time or opportunity to accumulate all the experience of your predecessors, acquire the knowledge in a different way — by consciously thinking about how the experts around you operate and deliberately learning from them. Of course, you shouldn’t aim to become a carbon copy of another person. Deeply smart people are a unique product of their particular mind-set, education, and experience. But you should be able to identify the elements of their knowledge and behavior that make them so valuable to the organization.